The sentence is one of many forms of sarcasm University of Otago computer science PhD student Pradeesh Pradeesh is hoping to detect using computers, in his bid to rid the internet of cyber-bullying and hate speech.
The 31-year-old Malaysian international student said most of the content created in social media was generally sarcastic, and New Zealand had among the highest number of cyber-bullying victims in the world.
‘‘The bread and butter of my thesis is whether we can actually detect the target of sarcasm or not.’’
Because sarcasm was so subjective, it was difficult for humans to pick up.
So teaching a computer to detect it would also be very difficult, he said.
‘‘When someone sends you a smiley-face emoji, are they being passive-aggressive, or are they being nice?
‘‘Our experimental results suggest that this is a hard problem for machines to automatically classify sarcasm.
‘‘It is unsurprising to us, as we [humans] can’t detect sarcasm accurately because what constitutes sarcasm varies from one person to another person.’’
Computer programmers were not yet able to detect sarcasm, but he believed it was possible.
‘‘Rome was not built in a day. What we are doing is taking baby steps towards this. We are trying to push towards the limits.
‘‘We are showing what the problem is now, what we have discovered, and how we could move forward so that other people can take this even further in the future and make the world a better place.’’
Mr Pradeesh won the University of Otago Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition and the People’s Choice Award on Thursday night after giving a snapshot of his PhD research titled Detecting the target of sarcasm is hard: Really?.
He was delighted to win $750 and now has the opportunity to represent Otago in the Asia-Pacific 3MT Competition and the Matariki Network of Universities 3MT Competition.
University of Otago zoology masters student Giverny Forbes won the masters category of the 3MT competition with research about living with leopard seals.
She won $500 and will also have the opportunity to compete in the Matariki Network of Universities 3MT Competition.
